How to speed up Google adsense and analytics loading time?

3
votes

This might fall under the category of "you can't", but I thought it might be prudent to at least see if there is something I can do about this.

According to FireBug, the major bottleneck in my page loading times seems to be a gap between the loading of the html and the loading of Google adsense and analytics. Notice in the screenshot below that the initial GET only takes 214 ms, and that adsense + analytics loading takes roughly 130 ms combined. However, the entire page load time is 1.12 seconds due to that large pause in between the initial GET and the adsense/analytics loading.

If it makes any difference at all, the site is running off of the ASP.NET MVC RC1 stack.

alt text http://kevinwilliampang.com/pics/firebug.jpg

Update: After removing adsense and analytics, I'm still seeing a slow response time. Hovering over the initial GET request, I see that the following speeds: 96ms Receiving Data, 736ms DOMContentLoaded (event), 778ms 'load' (event). I'm guessing then that the performance is a result of my own jQuery javascript that has processing tied to the ($document).ready() event?

6
asp.netasp.net-mvcoptimizationperformance
What happens if you try this on a simple "hello world" ASP.NET MVC page? Does the timing change at all? - Jeff Atwood
Yeah. I think it has to do with the third party libs I'm including in my .js file. I've got jquery, jquery validator, and jquery autocomplete in my .js file along with some $(document).ready stuff. When I remove the .js include, timing gets better. - Kevin Pang
That's a little surprising - plenty of sites which use jquery and adsense. Are you in a position to give us the code or a URL? - annakata
Unfortunately not yet. I think I'll just wait until I launch the site before bothering to ask again. It seems like having the client side code would be advantageous here. - Kevin Pang

6 Answers

4
votes

You should place your analytics code at the bottom of the page so that everything else loads first. Other than that, I don't think there's much you can do.

edit: Actually, I just found this interesting blog post on a way to speed up analytics by hosting your own urchin.js file. Maybe it's worth a look.

1
votes

I've never seen anything like that using Firebug on Stack Overflow and we use Analytics as well.

I just ran a trace and I see the request for the

http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?...

Happening directly after the DOMContentLoaded event (the blue line). So I'd suspect the AdSense, first. Have you tried disabling that?

1
votes

As it goes, I happen to have rather heavily researched this just this week. Long story short, you are screwed. As others have said the best you can do is put it at the bottom of the list of requests and make the rest of your code depend on ready rather than onload events - jQuery is really good here. Some portion of the js is static, so you could clone that locally if you keep an eye on it for maintenance purposes.

The google code isn't quite as helpful as it could be in this area*, but it's their ballgame and anything you do to change it is going to be both complex and risky. In theory, wrapping with a non-blocking script call in the header is possible, but would be unlikely to gain you a benefit given the additional abstraction, and ultimately with adsense your payload is an html source, not script.

* it's possible google have a good reason, but nothing I can deduce from the code they expose

0
votes

Probably not anything you can do aside from putting those includes right before the closing body tag, if you haven't already. JavaScript includes block parallel HTTP requests which is why they should be kept out of <head>

0
votes

Surely Google's servers will be the fastest part of the loading, given that your ISP and most ISPs will have a local cache of the files too?

You could inject the script into the head on page load perhaps, but I'm not sure how that effects urchin.js.

0
votes

Could be that your page simply takes that long to parse? It seems nothing network-related is happening. It simply waits around a second before the adsense/analytics requests are even fired off. I don't suppose you have a few hundred tables on the page or something? ;)